A L E X G A W R O N S K I

Black Box, video screening, the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP), Sydney, curated by Scott Donovan

SD video (Mini-dv) 2:03

This video utilises footage recorded in Rome in 2003. At this time, anti-war rallies were eminently apparent throughout Italy. The rainbow PACE (Peace) flags became ubiquitous symbols of popular Italian resistance to the US backed wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. The ready commercialisation of these symbols of popular resistance seemed paradoxical. So too did their sale, in this instance by a migrant most likely otherwise unemployed, in the midst of the suburb EUR, symbol of Mussolini’s failed fascist utopia. Today EUR’s utopia is bureaucratic, the suburb predominantly housing government administration agencies and their offices. Here, the lone itinerant vendor, generally ignored by local passers-by, selling Peace flags from a traffic island amidst Mussolini’s fascist urban dream turned sterile bureaucratic hub, seemed to capture a whole global ethos: the commercial packaging of resistance, the survivalist opportunism of displaced non-native urban populations, the slide of politics into bureaucratic managerialism and a sense of abandonment resulting from utopia’s return to the idea of the ‘no-place’ from whence it came.